By Benjamin Smith Hand It Over! A retailer asking for more margin? Not shocking – or ridiculous. It’s a free country – you can decide if you want to offer more, or stare them down. Unless they have no respect for you or your brand, in most cases, when they ask for more margin they […]

By Vincent Young The battle for power at retail often provides very black and white perspective to those on the brand side, or the retailer side. Let’s face it – we both think the other needs us more than we need them – unless of course you are a challenger brand, in which case you […]

You might think that the big players have seemingly unlimited funds that allow them to execute plans that cover the marketing spectrum, but that doesn’t mean their spend makes sense.

What would you do if you were Sharp? Do you think you can win by driving customers to the stores alone? Or do you win by converting customers that are already in the store by locking down the aisle? How did Sharp get to their strategy?

As long as I can remember, only two brands of toothpaste have mattered – Crest and Colgate. I use Crest. Why do I use Crest, you ask? Because, as a very young child, our family dentist used Crest during my annual check-up and he then gave it a tacit recommendation that we should be using it too when he gave me a sample tube of Crest (along with floss and a new toothbrush). From that moment on, my Mother would look for the Crest brand of toothpaste for our family to use. When a brand is either directly or indirectly specified as “appropriate for optimal effectiveness” by an expert or by a complimentary good, then your brand’s ability to wield assortment, pricing, and promotional power at retail increase significantly. Sounds like a recipe for Retail Leverage (or inoculation against private label).

This article explores pushing the boundaries of your own retail comfort level and looking at channels that aren’t necessary alternative, because they are already selling products from your category. I’ve got 2 great examples of retailers in this story – and as the title suggests – they might hold the key to big dollar and lots of leverage in general!

I never pass up a good analogy to help myself understand a complicated story, and spice up a boring one. The growing use of private brands (or private label) by retailers has become the key story of this new era in retail marketing. There are so many different stories and perspectives floating around, I think what gets lost in the buzz is the underlying reason of why retailers have turned to private brands. So what does retailer’s private brand strategy have to do with the NFL?

This process has one major flaw if you are a brand whose business case is primarily built on accessing the consumer through the world of retail – the retailer is predisposed to prefer a private label solution …